Jim van der Ploeg
My Corpus will be modern electronic music, since it’s the type of music I’m most familiar with. It’s of course a relatively new type of music with much still unexplored and a lot has developed over even the past 20 years. What I think will be interesting to compare here is geographical differences: Western and Eastern cultures are of course very different of each other and this reflects in their music, but even between just Europe and America there should be plenty of differences that can be explored.
The Corpus for this project was the music of two different artists in the EDM (Electronic Dance Music) Scene. The first artist is Martin Garrix, a well-known dutch DJ with 23 million monthly listeners who primarily makes house music for the mainstream public but also branches out to other types of sound such as pop music. The second artist is Shingo Nakamura, a lesser known DJ from Japan with 200.000 montly listeners who almost exclusively releases progressive house music and mixes.
The idea here is to see if there are recognizable differences between the music of the two artists and how much these differences can be explained by the differences between the artists: Although they are both EDM DJs, they come from different countries, release slightly different genres of music and have a large difference in their following.
Key differences that can be noted here are:
Although this project compared just two different artists and their discography, some clear differences between their discography were visible throughout the different songs.
Generally the songs from Shingo Nakamura had a higher instrumentalness and energy level, which can be explained respectively by the relative lack of absence of vocals in his discography compared to Martin Garrix’s Discography and the overall higher loudness in Shingo Nakamura’s songs.
Another difference is the overal tempo: Shingo Nakamura has primarily progressive house tracks which have a very consistent tempo throughout the songs, while Martin Garrix has a lot more varied tempo both when looking at the tempo of each specific song and the tempo changes throughout the song, which can be explained by the greater variety of genres of electronic music that he makes.
If a classifier were to look at the two discographies, the duration would be a large factor in guessing whether a song is made by Martin Garrix or Shingo Nakamura: Whereas all of Martin Garrix’s songs have a duration of around 3 minutes, capping out at 4, Shingo Nakamura has just half of his songs at around this duration, with the other half ranging from 5 to up to 10 minutes length. This difference could have some correlation with Martin Garrix’s popularity: Since his songs have to be designed to be played at radio stations they can’t be too long.
In conclusion, there are many differences between the two artists’ discography, which can be explained by the different types of genres present in their music and their relative size as artists. Unfortunately, no clear influence of their country of origin on their music was identified in this comparison. Further research might further explain that and other influences on their music.